As Adoption Grows, Companies Want MSPs to Manage Public Cloud: Report

The majority of IT decision makers in large and midsize US companies want to outsource their public cloud management, with 70 percent preferring to deal with a single vendor to manage their entire IT infrastructure, according to a new report.

Digital Fortress, a managed cloud and colocation provider with data centers in Seattle, surveyed 100 IT decision makers online in June. The company found that 65 percent of companies plan to partially outsource management of public cloud to a third-party.

When selecting a managed service provider, 70 percent of companies prefer a single vendor for managing cloud and on-premise or colocated infrastructure.

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“Our survey shows that even though cloud computing is popular, it hasn’t diminished the need for IT infrastructure management,” Matt Gerber, CEO at Digital Fortress said in a statement. “With 86% of respondents having workloads in the cloud and in data centers, companies need ever more guidance in managing and monitoring their distributed environments. MSPs should focus their investments on successfully delivering the core IT benefits of reliability, availability, security and performance, across multiple infrastructures, to compete for enterprise dollars.”

While the survey is based on a small sample size, the results are consistent with other industry data. 451 Research expects managed cloud services revenues to grow from $17 billion in 2014 to $43 billion in 2018.

Eighty-seven percent of respondents currently have workloads in the cloud, which indicates a high level of comfort and familiarity with cloud services. Nearly half (48 percent) have a private cloud deployment while 25 percent use public cloud. Thirty-nine percent of respondents plan on moving more workloads to the public cloud in five years, while private cloud deployments will stay the same.

As IT executives at larger companies feel more comfortable outsourcing infrastructure, managed cloud services providers have a real opportunity to increase their ARPU – particularly if IT execs are looking for a single vendor to manage much of their cloud.